I Could Not Order My Men To Do What I Would Not Do Myself,
But, Though I Tried To Justify Myself On The Plea Of Necessity,
I Could Not Adopt This Mode Of Hunting.
If your object is to secure
the best specimens for a museum, it may be allowable, and even
deserving
Of commendation, as evincing a desire to kill only those
really wanted; but if, as has been practiced by some Griquas and others
who came into the country after Mr. Cumming, and fired away indiscriminately,
great numbers of animals are wounded and allowed to perish miserably,
or are killed on the spot and left to be preyed on by vultures and hyenas,
and all for the sole purpose of making a "bag", then I take it to be evident
that such sportsmen are pretty far gone in the hunting form of insanity.
My men shot a black rhinoceros in this way, and I felt glad to get away
from the only place in which I ever had any share in night-hunting.
We passed over the immense pan Ntwetwe, on which the latitude could be taken
as at sea. Great tracts of this part of the country are of calcareous tufa,
with only a thin coating of soil; numbers of "baobab" and "mopane" trees
abound all over this hard, smooth surface. About two miles beyond
the northern bank of the pan we unyoked under a fine specimen of the baobab,
here called, in the language of Bechuanas, Mowana; it consisted of
six branches united into one trunk. At three feet from the ground
it was eighty-five feet in circumference.
These mowana-trees are the most wonderful examples of vitality in the country;
it was therefore with surprise that we came upon a dead one at Tlomtla,
a few miles beyond this spot. It is the same as those
which Adamson and others believed, from specimens seen in Western Africa,
to have been alive before the flood. Arguing with a peculiar
mental idiosyncracy resembling color-blindness, common among
the French of the time, these savans came to the conclusion that
"therefore there never was any flood at all." I would back a true mowana
against a dozen floods, provided you do not boil it in hot sea-water;
but I can not believe that any of those now alive had a chance
of being subjected to the experiment of even the Noachian deluge.
The natives make a strong cord from the fibres contained in the pounded bark.
The whole of the trunk, as high as they can reach, is consequently often
quite denuded of its covering, which in the case of almost any other tree
would cause its death, but this has no effect on the mowana except to make it
throw out a new bark, which is done in the way of granulation.
This stripping of the bark is repeated frequently, so that it is common
to see the lower five or six feet an inch or two less in diameter
than the parts above; even portions of the bark which have broken
in the process of being taken off, but remain separated from the parts below,
though still connected with the tree above, continue to grow,
and resemble closely marks made in the necks of the cattle
of the island of Mull and of Caffre oxen, where a piece of skin is detached
and allowed to hang down. No external injury, not even a fire,
can destroy this tree from without; nor can any injury be done from within,
as it is quite common to find it hollow; and I have seen one
in which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep as in a hut.
Nor does cutting down exterminate it, for I saw instances in Angola
in which it continued to grow in length after it was lying on the ground.
Those trees called exogenous grow by means of successive layers
on the outside. The inside may be dead, or even removed altogether,
without affecting the life of the tree. This is the case
with most of the trees of our climate. The other class is called endogenous,
and increases by layers applied to the inside; and when the hollow there
is full, the growth is stopped - the tree must die. Any injury
is felt most severely by the first class on the bark; by the second
on the inside; while the inside of the exogenous may be removed,
and the outside of the endogenous may be cut, without stopping the growth
in the least. The mowana possesses the powers of both. The reason is that
each of the laminae possesses its own independent vitality;
in fact, the baobab is rather a gigantic bulb run up to seed than a tree.
Each of eighty-four concentric rings had, in the case mentioned,
grown an inch after the tree had been blown over. The roots,
which may often be observed extending along the surface of the ground
forty or fifty yards from the trunk, also retain their vitality
after the tree is laid low; and the Portuguese now know that the best way
to treat them is to let them alone, for they occupy much more room
when cut down than when growing.
The wood is so spongy and soft that an axe can be struck in so far
with a good blow that there is great difficulty in pulling it out again.
In the dead mowana mentioned the concentric rings were well seen. The average
for a foot at three different places was eighty-one and a half of these rings.
Each of the laminae can be seen to be composed of two, three, or four
layers of ligneous tubes; but supposing each ring the growth of one year,
and the semidiameter of a mowana of one hundred feet in circumference
about seventeen feet, if the central point were in the centre of the tree,
then its age would lack some centuries of being as old
as the Christian era (1400). Though it possesses amazing vitality,
it is difficult to believe that this great baby-looking bulb or tree
is as old as the Pyramids.
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